Riotous Citizens: Ethnic Conflict in Multicultural Britain

In 2001, Britain saw another summer of rioting in its cities, with violent uprisings in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford. With a particular focus on the Bradford riot of July 2001, this book explores the reasons for those riots and why they mark a new departure in Britain's racial politics.Riots involving racial factors are nothing new in Britain. In the late 1950s, Whites and African-Caribbeans fought in Nottingham and in Notting Hill. The 1980s saw several summers of violence across England's cities, following the Brixton and Toxteth riots of 1981. However, the antecedents on those occasions involved heavy policing of predominantly African-Caribbean communities. The riots of 2001 are more complex, There were elements of 1950s-style race riots, with South Asians and Whites attacking each other's properties, but there was also collaboration between Whites and South Asians confronting the police as a common adversary. The spread of unrest was also clearly linked to the presence of the BNP and other far-right groups, as well as the entrenched poverty and unemployment of these cities.Linking original empirical research conducted amongst the Pakistani community in Bradford, with a sophisticated conceptual analysis, this is the first book-length study of the 2001 riots and will be required reading for courses on race and ethnicity, social movements and policing public order.